THE SPORT COUNT

Knicks centre Eddy Curry.

There’s just something about being a professional sportsman in New York, it seems.

The hustle and bustle gets to you, the media glare all too bright, and all of a sudden you find yourself working out the loneliness by making awkward, legally questionable love to an intern in the back of a truck. Or getting crunked on red wine and blowing a hole in your thigh with a gun that should have never left the waistband of your sweatpants. Or, in Eddy Curry’s case, propositioning your chaffeur in between hurling cruel, racist obscenities at him. Allegedly:

Knick center Eddy Curry was slapped with a shocking sexual-harassment suit yesterday by his former driver, who claims the 6-foot-11 hoopster tried to solicit gay sex from him.

Stunning court papers charge that Curry, a married father of several kids, repeatedly approached chauffeur David Kuchinsky “in the nude,” saying, “Look at me, Dave, look” and, “Come and touch it, Dave.”

If ever there was a sports story more perfectly designed to delight the snarky creeps hiding in the cruelest corners of the internet — or, for that matter, the New York Post — I haven’t read it. (Seriously, ‘Curry Gets Called For Sex Foul’? If you thought 2009 would somehow see the Post refrain from punter-pleasing cheap shots and base sub-editorial decisions based on moving papers more than reporting the news, your dream has already been dashed).

If you’re in the market for cheap laughs, this terrible tale does hit a lot of spots.

We’re given the impression the Knicks centre inexplicably channels HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame whenever he’s cruising. “Look at me, Dave. Come and touch it, Dave. I can’t do that, Dave.”

And the racist taunts? Jesus. They read like an early draft of a Chappelle Show skit. Curry allegedly hurled these corkers at Kuchinsky: “fucking Jew,” “cracker,” “white slave,” “white devil” and — oddest, considering the group’s fairly explicit stance on the Jewish people — “grandmaster of the KKK.”

But the laughs come tinged with a quiet guilt, at least for those still grasping to the assumption of innocence as a vital tenet of the legal system.

Yes, Curry is an overweight, vastly overpaid basketballer, so ‘mocking’ seems like the default setting when we’re talking Eddy. And that’s okay; basketball players are duely compensated for the vicious taunts and unjustified hatred regularly sent their way.

And yes, sportsmen — that is, celebrities — are forced to accept that they’ll often be cast in a cruel light, often unfairly. But these are serious allegations. They’re funny allegations, in a way — seriously, grandmaster of the KKK? — but they’re genuinely cruel, and grotesque. If they’re untrue — and the possibility of a lowly-paid chauffeur with a criminal history thinking the rich baller sitting in the back of his limousine is a ticket to quick settlement bucks can’t be ignored — then Curry has been grossly defamed. He’s been beaten and bruised, his reputation forever tarnished, not as an athlete (which would be okay), but as a human. It’s hard not to sympathise.

When the papers spurt these hot claims off the presses, they’re greeted with a quiet assumption of guilt. Of course they are. The public views the world of professional sports as a place where serious perversion is acceptable, and sexual favours are guaranteed, and rapes or assaults or batteries are covered up by snake oil sports agents and quickfire public relations machines.

Of course they’re guilty, we figure. They’re rich. They’re not like us. They expect the world to come to them.

When a finger is pointed at them, we view these sportsmen like the criminals on Cops; we’re told to presume their innocence until proven guilty, but we don’t. Why should we? Where’s the interest in innocence? Where’s the thrill in learning someone is a good human, or at least a reasonable one? I mean, damn it, we’ve seen them get away with murder.

So we assume Curry is guilty. We write paragraphs like the one that leads this article, where ‘allegedly’ — that magic word that protects us from libel claims  — is an afterthought, and the focus is set squarely on the salacious and the sexual. The worst part of this story for Eddy Curry is that there’s humour in the details; we’re too busy laughing at the bizarre racism and robotic come-ons to think about whether David Kuchinsky is telling the truth.

Because he’s rich, and well-known, Eddy Curry (and his wife, and kids) have been robbed at gunpoint in his own home. Now, it seems, he might be getting robbed again… except this time, it might just happen in a courtroom.

Posted By: Anton